Annual Hot Sauce Expo in Brooklyn is So Spicy You'll Need A Doctor

Hot sauce purveyors and devotees celebrated the spicy stuff at the Hot Sauce Expo in Brooklyn. Our Natalie Duddridge sampled some and filed this report.

Biting into some spicy salsas at the fourth Annual Hot Sauce Expo in Greenpoint. From mild tang to fiery bang it's an event that attracts hundreds of food fanatics.

"I just love spicy food I'm a junkie for the stuff I love the adrenaline rush," said Hot Sauce Expo founder Steve Seabury.

Seabury is the founder and also one of dozens of vendors who come from across North America to sell their spicy samples. He says many of the people coming to taste test start out overconfident and aren't quite ready to handle the heat.

"You get these newbies saying I just want to try the mild stuff out and you got these guys who say 'I can have anything,' you get them crying and the ambulance is coming — we sent two people to the hospital yesterday!"

But it's a very different story for Ed Currie who says hot peppers saved his life. He was diagnosed with cancer more than a decade ago, but instead of taking pills he ate peppers.

"I truly believe, and there's a lot of research that shows that chilies help prevent or fight cancer and heart disease," said Currie, president of Pucker Butt Pepper Company. "I haven't been diagnosed with any tumors benign or malignant in about ten years now."

So we decided to find out the potential miracle powers of peppers ourselves.

Duddridge: "My heart is beating because we're about to try the hottest pepper in the world the Carolina reaper. At first just a minor initial shock, then a steady burning increased to the point that my tongue got so numb I couldn't speak, and then the tears of laughter."